The Computing Research Association (or CRA) has been involved in shaping public policy of relevance to computing research for more than two decades. More recently the CRA Government Affairs program has enhanced its efforts to help the members of the computing research community contribute to the public debate knowledgeably and effectively.

With today’s Senate Appropriations Committee markup of the FY 2018 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill, along with the House Appropriations Committee markup of their version of the bill 15 days ago, we now have a good insight into how the National Science Foundation might fare in the FY 2018 appropriations process (along with a few other […]

President Trump released his annual budget request last week. As we have done in years past, the CRA Policy Blog will be doing a series of posts on the assorted budget requests for key science agencies, particularly highlighting the ones that are of importance to the computing community.

To round out the President’s 2017 (FY17) Budget Requests for key science research accounts, which were released in February, we wanted to cover the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense (DOD), and the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST). Combined these three accounts cover the vast majority of the Federal government’s investment in IT and computing research.

The National Science Foundation has released a new public access plan for scientific journal articles that arise from research wholly or partly funded by the agency. This plan, called “Today’s Data, Tomorrow’s Discoveries,” is an outgrowth of an Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) memo, released in February of 2013, which directed, “each Federal […]

The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology is currently marking up the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2015 (H.R. 1806), introduced by Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX) — a bill designed to provide three key science agencies with authorizations for funding for FY 2016 and FY 2017 and implement other policies. The bill is cast as […]

Tonight the House narrowly passed an omnibus FY15 appropriations measure that would fund 11 of 12 annual appropriations bills and provide stop-gap funding for the 12th (the Homeland Security bill), a move that would provide increases for the National Science Foundation and for key computing programs at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The Senate […]

On May 22nd the House Science Committee took up the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (or FIRST) Act of 2014. The bill’s lead sponsor is the House Science Committee chairman, Lamar Smith (R-TX). This bill is to reauthorize the majority of the America COMPETES Act of 2010, and focuses on the non-energy agencies […]

Given the relatively austere budget caps for FY2015 the President and Congress agreed to as part of last December’s budget agreement, the President’s relatively flat budget request for the National Science Foundation in FY2015 isn’t unexpected. In fact, the President’s request for NSF would have the agency grow just 1 percent over FY14 (to $7.3 billion), […]

So, the good news this year was that the President and Congress were working from the same set of numbers for the first time in a long time. The bad news is that those numbers are pretty underwhelming. The President introduced his FY15 budget request today, a budget that would remain largely flat — increasing […]

The House and Senate Appropriations Committees have just released their drafts (House – Senate) of the FY2013 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Bill, and the numbers look pretty decent for NSF and NIST. Short version: NSF would see an increase of 4.3 percent overall in FY13; NIST would see increases of $54-56 million to its core […]